


Balm

by Thimblerig



Series: Music and Moonlight and Your Own Heart's Blood [2]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: (I can't believe that's not a canonical tag), Established Relationship, F/M, Flirtatious Wound Care, Mild Smut, Plot What Plot, Service Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-23 21:41:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16626926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: But he stayed and whispered in her ear, dark as midnight, “Is there aught else I might help you with, Mademoiselle?”





	Balm

**Author's Note:**

> // I rather liked this scene, but it doesn't fit the general tone of The Three Phantoms, which managed to get through over 75,000 words of hand kissing, forehead kissing, and even _nose_ kissing without ever quite getting to the common, or garden, “kissing” kissing.
> 
> Yes, this is a kissing story. (More suggestive than smutty.)
> 
> It's also mildly spoilery for the main fic and takes place a little in the future of the current chapter. If you haven't read that, though, all you need to know is that Athos is a damaged - but sweet - Masked Man and Sylvie is a forthright - and sweet - Young Ingenue and they like each other quite a bit.
> 
> If you _have_ been reading the main fic, I make no promises. This might be a What If scenario flashing through someone's dying brain...

Sylvie doffed the sensible, tailored jacket she'd been wearing as she strode through the door of her dressing room. She shut it with a swift kick and tossed the vile garment in the direction of her clothes hanger. It fell short, and landed in a dismal heap on the floor as she worked furiously at the ties of her skirt and stepped out of the collapsing fabric, ignoring the mess in the low light of a single gaslamp.

She sighed, ignoring the daybed and sitting on a reversed chair by the dressing table, its hooped back to her front. It was a chemise of the finest cambric that she wore, cut generously and gathered finely at the neck, and at the cuffs, and it was the work of a moment to slip the strings knotted at her collarbone and let the light material fall around her hips. Pulling the long steel pins from her coiffure to drop them with a plebeian tinkle into a shallow dish, she drew the thick mass of her hair over one bare shoulder, folded her hands on the hoop, rested her chin on her lightly bandaged hands, and sighed once more, operatically.

They weren't _bad_ burns as these things go. The steel bones sewn into the seams of her bodice the night that… all _that_ happened… had had layers of cloth between themselves and her skin, which protected her as they heated in the furnace. It could have been so much worse. But the ring of stripes dented into her skin was sensitive to the heat and pressure of a working day - even the cool air on her skin was a balm.

“I do not think they will scar.”

Sylvie smiled to the blank plaster wall. “Athos. What if I want them to?”

“You don't,” he said.

“But if I wanted.”

“Sometimes all that pain tells us,” he told her grimly, “is that we can be hurt.”

"And yet,” she answered, “scars write the message, ‘We survived.’”

“You don't need that message written,” he said, pained. “You just _do.”_

She wondered suddenly if he was wearing his mask tonight, a dark thing of leather and straps, grimly covering his own injury. And did it protect him? Pain him? “Athos, I'm s-”

“I wouldn't hear you say that for all the world,” he said hurriedly, and she huffed a brief, bitter laugh.

“Won't you come in? I could use some help with the ointment.”

The silence drew out, broken only by the tick of her little clock, then changed its texture as the mirrored door he had built into her room opened, the feel of the air shifting on her bare skin as he stepped over the hidden threshold and the door shut behind him. A hesitant scrape of a three-legged stool and she felt the warmth of him sitting behind her, heard the delicate splash of washing hands and the scrape of an opening jar.

The first touch of his fingers, the cool balm and the warmth of his hands behind it, raised gooseflesh up and down the curve of her back. Almost in spite of herself she relaxed further, drooping over the hoop of her chair and hummed, nearly inaudible, the trilling contralto line to _La_ _Cenerentola's_ first love duet. Eyes half-shut she smiled again when she heard him pick up the tenor harmony.

He kept at his labour a _long_ time - Sylvie would bet ready money he'd an explanation down pat about pores and blood flow and therapeutic massage or some such - and she drowsed beneath it, unable to contain a tiny whine when he finally stopped, the warmth of him drawing away.

“Hush,” he whispered to Sylvie and the ticking clock. “I shouldn't stay so long.”

Into the awkward silence that followed, she said at last, “You haven't done my front.”

“I had thought -” he said hesitantly.

Sylvie turned her head. Athos’ face was bare, the marks of his own survival written plain, and his living face was troubled and frowning. She tilted her eyebrows and opened her eyes wide like a begging puppy and watched him twitch. She waggled her eyebrows up and down goofily and surprised him into the sputtering, swallowed laugh that she remembered so fondly. With a shy half-smile he acquiesced.

But she returned to her stance on the chair, leaned over resting comfortably on her crossed forearms, so that he had to shuffle forward to reach, his knees spread wide and surrounding her, and find his way by feel, one unguent-covered hand finding her scorch-striped ribs, t'other landing awkwardly on the smooth curve of her belly. He froze, and she could hear him biting his lip. “Athos,” she told him gently. “I don't break.” And he set to work, smoothing and tending - and she'd known the striped burns had _hurt,_ of course she had, but it was only when the pain left that she quite realised what she had been enduring.

She said nothing when one hand crept up to palm her breast, only her head lifted as she breathed in sharply, as it was weighed consideringly and a thumb brushed the hard, sensitive nipple before Athos’ hand returned to its former work. He chuckled, and she grumbled low in her chest, where he could feel the thrumming of her diaphragm.

Sitting up, she felt the ends of his shaggy hair tickle her bare shoulder and the side of her neck as he lipped along her skin and she sighed, opening out her throat for kissing then turning that she might touch her temple to his, gentle as a bird returning to its nest. She felt the shudder of his breath, over her skin, against her body, and dropped her hand to his leather-clad knee, reassuring, before edging the rumples of her chemise a little further down her hips. Her belly tautened as he followed her lead, stroking and smoothing the skin she revealed to him. And she brought her other hand up and reached behind, catching at his neck and prisoning him, captive, where she could steal kisses off his crooked lips and trust him to touch, to let _him_ trust _her..._

The clock chimed the hour and she twitched, cursing to herself. But he stayed and whispered in her ear, dark as midnight, “Is there aught else I might help you with, Mademoiselle?”

“Hmm.” After consideration, Sylvie said, “Shoes.”

“Ah… shoes?” he asked, hands stilling.

“Oh yes,” she said airily, “shoes. They're a terrible trouble to get off - all those loops and buttons...”

“Of course,” he said, low and dark, and the heat of him rose up behind her. She rose with it, stepping out of the last folds of her fine cambric underthings and setting forward one neatly shod foot for him to kneel before. “But,” she said, touching a vivid blue garter as he looked up with heated eyes, “I'll keep the stockings.”

Athos stroked her silk-clad instep as he removed the shoe, still holding her gaze, and she whimpered. As he took off the other he bent to kiss its slender arch. Sylvie reached for him in sudden desperation.  

“Athos!”

He looked up at her questioning, silent, and Sylvie drew him firmly to his feet. She pursed her lips and lifted her chin and he smiled at her, so sweetly her heart might break again.

She hooked her scratched fingers in his belt and drew him toward her, gentle and inexorable, and whispered into his mouth: “I think you're wearing entirely too many clothes right now.”

He reached around her and turned off the gaslamp.

“So I am,” he said.

**Author's Note:**

> // _as the mirrored door he had built into her room opened_ \- Lest anyone get any ideas of disapprobation, Athos _didn't_ put a secret door in a young woman's dressing room. He put a secret door in a _disused_ dressing room and Sylvie was shuffled in there later as a result of Opera Company politics. I mean, he totally was a creeper, but only after they became good friends.
> 
> // _With a shy half-smile he acquiesced._ \- I'd say that Athos is whipped, here, but he's also exactly where he wants to be, so…
> 
> // _where he could feel the thrumming of her diaphragm_ \- Fun fact: if a singer is in training, you don't even have to touch them to feel the vibrations when they sing, just hover your hand a couple of inches in front of their solar plexus. It's the weirdest thing.


End file.
